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Warts have become so common that health professionals use a myriad of treatments, not to mention home remedies and folk remedies that are shared on personal blogs and websites alike. We’ll go over some of the more common treatments used by professionals, and mention some of the more popular home recipes.

The best treatment for any condition is prevention. The best way to prevent picking up the virus is to wear footwear in public areas where water is present. Be especially careful around locker room showers at health clubs, or at public swimming pools. If you have an open cut or a break in the skin, be especially cautious. If you think your shower may be contaminated, a dilute bleach cleaning solution will be sufficient to remove the virus.

A common treatment used by podiatrists is salicylic acid. This acid works by slowly eating away at the skin infected by wart. The acid is in a cream form, is applied every week for 5-6 weeks, and is covered with a strong adhesive tape such as duct tape to ensure the acid stays in the correct spot. After each treatment, the dead skin is shaved away with a scalpel to get to the deeper skin where the wart is hiding. This is an effective, painless way to get rid of a plantar wart. The downside is that it requires consistent office visits over a couple weeks.

Another common treatment for warts is cryotherapy, or freezing the warts. By using a very direct freezing solution, you can induce a local frost bite on the wart, causing the skin and therefore the wart to die. Similar to salicylic acid, this is a treatment that needs to be applied several times over a couple weeks. A common mistake when using this treatment is that the cryotherapy is not applied long enough to penetrate the thick skin of the plantar skin. In order for freezing to work, the therapy must be applied long enough for the treatment to be painful. For this reason, podiatrists are using this therapy less and less.

We’ve only scratched the surface of wart treatment. We’ll discuss some more next post.